Mattin “Exquisite Corpse” LP
“It’s hard to think of many artists that have made radical Marxist concerns and over-arching concepts seem even vaguely interesting in a rock-as-rock context, there’s uh…. well, there’s Mattin. Billy Bao were, for a while, the most amazing marriage of sociopathic rage and sociopathtic theory, perfectly marrying Mattin’s love for Lou with his love for Looting. And now comes this, a new solo album where he is joined by the always-amazing Margarida Garcia on electric double bass, Kevin Failure of Pink Reason on electric guitar and piano and Loy Fankbonner on drums, while he steps in on vocals and lyrics. Inspired by the Surrealist concept of The Exquisite Corpse, drawings or words written on folded paper where you must add the next contribution without any knowledge of what the other person has put down, Mattin handed out a set of lyrics and asked each player to lay down their part without any other guidance or any other instruments to play to. Each part was then mixed in as-is with Mattin’s vocals over the top. No two musicians were allowed in the studio at the same time, everything was one take and no playbacks were allowed. The results are jaw-dropping. The staggered rhythms and sudden speed-ups and stops/starts give the music an unpredictable/feral energy with Failure’s guitar sounding like something out of the first couple of Crass albums while Fankbonner moves from scattershot punctuation to sudden last-minute accelerations accompanied by Garcia’s cranking bass. Mattin’s vocals are amazing, possessed of the kind of hectoring/hysterical energy of The Afflicted Man or even Lydon circa Metal Box while the music feels like a spiritual cousin of the whole Oi/d-beat/post-punk UK aggro scene, albeit re-thunk by Japanese gods of thunder Kousokuya and with Tori Kudo on the mix. At other points, when the piano comes in, it could almost be Yoko Ono’s Flyonly here peace gets no chances, beds are on fire and the time is right for fighting in the street. The absolute success of Mattin’s gamble only goes to underline how important chance, freedom and aleatoric strategies are to keeping rock music alive as any kind of expressive cultural force, something that has been internalised and re-stated again and again throughout its’ history, whether through punk’s deliberate refusal of ‘technique’, psychedelia’s inheritance of free improvisation as the keys to the kingdom or noise’s refusal of dialogue altogether. Left to chance, beyond any notions of exchange, beyond organisation, beyond entertainment or simple ‘communication’, beyond bullshit notions of ‘creating a space where dialogue can take place’ (perhaps the most tiresome apologia of contemporary art praxis) the best rock exists in a zone that’s unanswerable to technique, unassailable and incapable of assimilation and this new project from Mattin, well, it’s just like alla the best rock/roll, impossible to reproduce, offensive to any fixed artistic sensibility and drawing power by insisting on excess. Totally fantastic and highly recommended!”
Volcanic Tongue (by David Keenan, Glasgow October 2011)
Price: 14.00€
